NEWS Item: Vince McMahon, last week, settled a wrongful death suit filed by the widow of WWF pro wrestler Owen Hart for a reported $18 million.

The fact that this wasn’t big news, last week, is what disturbs me about American mass media and its reflexive, self-serving promotion of popular culture. Heck, it wasn’t even small news.

On May 23, 1999, Hart was killed in Kansas City performing an overtly dangerous stunt for McMahon during one of his WWF pay-per-view shows. Owen fell from the ceiling of the Kemper Arena.

The next day, the national news media did their duty. They not only made a considerable issue of Hart’s death, they began to provide some critical inspection of just what McMahon sells. They began to suggest that McMahon, pro wrestling’s undisputed and longtime boss, might be a professional creep.

After all, upon Hart’s death – after he was rushed to the hospital, too late, in an ambulance – McMahon ordered the show to continue, including a skit that found McMahon being beaten then rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

So for one day, May 24, the media stopped blindly embracing McMahon’s WWF for its popularity and the cross-promotional boost it could provide them, and instead wondered aloud how a man the likes of a Vince McMahon had become cable TV’s entertainment king and, given the WWF’s enormous popularity among kids, TV’s favorite babysitter.

But, by the next day, the media had returned to playing McMahon’s game. As long as the WWF remained a must-watch among the almighty younger TV demographic, the media quickly returned to its see, hear and speak-no-evil treatment of McMahon’s WWF.

From Regis Philbin to the Republican presidential convention, no one was willing to see McMahon’s for what he is for too long. No one was willing, except for one day, to detach themselves from the residual rewards that the WWF’s popularity could provide.

Hart was killed on a Sunday night, which made big news on Monday. On Monday night, the night after Hart’s death, McMahon eagerly exploited the tragedy for national cable ratings by staging a memorial show on USA Network. Naturally, McMahon saved his biggest attractions for last, to best hold the audience, to best cash in on Hart’s death, 24 hours later.

But by Tuesday, May 25, the media was done with the Hart story, done inspecting the ways and means of Vince McMahon.

And so it comes as small surprise that news of a settlement in Mrs. Hart’s wrongful death suit against McMahon made barely a sound.

As best as we can ascertain, the settlement was big news only in three places: On Fox Sports Net’s “The Last Word,” in Kansas City and in Calgary, home of the wrestling Hart Family.

About two years ago, just before we got off the phone, I suggested to pro wrestling superstar Bret “Hitman” Hart, Owen’s older brother, that they day would come when his conscience would overtake his earnings and he would become a leading activist in exposing the beyond-belief netherworld that is – and has been for 25 years – pro wrestling.

After all, Hart had already publicly declared his disgust for so much of what the industry had become in order to become such record-breaking TV programming.

He had already stated that pro wrestling is infested with sleaze, on and off TV. He had already stated that pro wrestling had become so pornographic, so over-the-edge violent and so pervaded with hateful social stereotyping that he no longer allowed his kids to watch what had become so wildly popular among kids.

And then his brother was killed.

Unlike Superstar Billy Graham, crippled from steroid abuse, and the squeaky-clean Bruno Sammartino – faded wrestling superstars who had warned, years ago, that the WWF was lousy with criminal conduct – Hart might not be as easily ignored. He’s regarded as a star within the modern genre. His entire career has found him in the thick of the sleaze.

And now it appears as if Hart is inclined to let it all out. Of course, whether anyone in the pro wrestling-embracing, anything-for-ratings, let-me-get-a-piece-of-the-action media is interested in the truth, is another issue.

Hart, 43, was a longtime WWF star, then spent the last year of his career with Ted Turner’s WCW. Hart recently retired, having suffered the last in a series of concussions.

He’d quit the WWF to join the WCW, not just for money, but to escape the twisted trash McMahon was selling. But it was too late. The WCW had already decided that the best way to compete with McMahon was to emulate his product. Hart was still in the business of selling sleaze to kids.

Friday, Hart appeared on Jim Rome’s “Last Word,” and, while he went off on several issues, it was tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. He knows a lot more. A lot more.

But Friday, at least for starters, Hart spoke words that should be taken seriously. For example, on the current state of pro wrestling: “The wrestlers are out there hurting themselves for real, now, and beating themselves to death, almost. . .”

“I don’t know if there’s any art form in bashing somebody over the head with a chair. If you’ve got big boobs and you can drop your pants in a wrestling ring, you get high ratings. That’s not what I loved about wrestling.”

Hart said that where the audience once was thought of as “marks” – suckers – the wrestlers have become the marks because they’re now ordered to perform increasingly dangerous stunts.

On McMahon (now in partnership with both CBS and NBC): “He’s a man who will do anything for a dollar . . . It’s amazing what kind of devious, sick, psychopath this guy really is.”

I know that Hart knows that he can, if he’s further inclined and if there are people in the media who are inclined to stop high-fiving the WWF long enough to listen, make life extremely uncomfortable for Vince McMahon and his TV enablers.

An admitted former steroid user, Hart knows that pro wrestling is still lousy with illegal drugs. He knows that pro wrestlers in their 20s and 30s continue to drop dead of institutionalized drug abuse. Their deaths go widely unpublicized, but they’re no less the result of anything-for-a-buck pro wrestling than was his brother’s.

Hart knows that sexual predators, including pedophiles, operated within the WWF – and with McMahon’s knowledge and, on occasion, his amusement – for years. Hart knows that Jesse Ventura knows about this, too. Yet, as Governor of Minnesota, Ventura continues to serve McMahon as a WWF attraction.

Hart’s a good man who has just left a horrible business. He owes it, not only to his kids, but to our kids, to blow the whistle. Only longer and louder. It won’t be easy. After all, why would talk show hosts and news folks wanna hear from Bret Hart when they can make nice – and improve ratings – by pandering to the latest WWF superstar delivered to them by Vince McMahon?